Daily Freeman Life Editor Ivan Lajara talks about journalism, living in the Hudson Valley, language, the Web, cats and even politics. But he shouldn't.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Can you be a fly on the virtual reality wall?

Pretty things are pleasant to look at, but that doesn't mean they work.

For more than a decade now, I've been trying to figure out the many ways of not just how to cover the news, but how to present the news in the best way possible.

I've been doing this from my little corner of the news landscape and I've been using the tools available to me as the baseline, if you will, for what can be done. I also do this because it's fun.

In the old days, this would come in the form of developing a new type of feature for the paper. Slowly (too slowly, if you ask me) but surely, these efforts evolved into it what encompasses the digital world. That is where things really started to bloom. There's always a risk of getting carried away by the latest shiny thing, but the underlining focus is always about what is the best tool to use to cover the news as best as possible with the limited resources that we have (and limited, they are).

You'll notice that I used two very recent 360-degree videos by the Freeman. I'm brainstorming ideas for when it would come in handy to use a 360 video already posted and then have an anchor to guide the viewer through the video. I'm aware of the ethical issues this could raise. Having a cartoon avatar with a hard news video can be jarring and can easily be seen as disrespectful to the issues portrayed in the video, which is the opposite of what one would want.

It does work for light-hearted and whimsical topics. And you could even have a 'show' around a topic, with a 'guest.' Stay tuned.

I have some ideas.

In the meantime, you're stuck with this:

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It's becoming increasingly difficult to share links around the web when there is currently a supernova of news (it's orange) taking up all the space. But let's give it a shot:

Yesterday's Internet, Today!'s opposite job is dirty microwave oven with a funky smell and some weird substance on the oven ceiling and sticky door and it doesn't work and you don't know how to dispose of it. You can dispose of this by forwarding it to a friend.